I did this little paint sketch during my TWSO workshop session on Tuesday night. I find that when I keep my hands busy doing creative things, I can think through creative problems better. The paints used are Peerless Paint watercolour chips, the pad is the lovely Papier Canal square watercolour paper block.

This fruit is called a Buddha’s Hand… I think if someone from our current day would have named it, it would have been called Cthulhu’s Maw. Interesting fruit, though. Wonderfully fragrant, almost floral rather than citrus. I’ve yet to figure out what I’ll be doing with it, but I’ll figure it out.

I was so very tired tonight. It was a do-not-pass-go and go directly to bed night. I scooped maple walnut ice cream into a cone and had that before retiring (and of course now, at 2:41am, I am a tad hungry) but lunch was had at Nuba today (with a small group of former McT coworkers whom I adore!) and one large meal a day works, sometimes.

I slept soundly from 7-ish to after midnight… then I started reading emails and posts and it was all downhill from there.

(**where have I been and why have I not seen the word “microaggression” before?!)

Two hours later and now fully aware of the grumbling belly and other things.

I was just thinking how busy I have been; so busy that I barely have time to reflect on anything that is not Immediately Important. Makes it hard to plan ahead, if you know what I mean. And also to .. self-reflect, which in turns acts as a sort of growth stunting mechanism.

I am not normally this tired. Not sure what that is about, apart from working the job and a half, other than perhaps cumulative fatigue because some of my excessive Haven binge-watching marathon. That lasted a couple of weeks and ended a week or so ago (but it was good… almost as good – no, definitely better – than my current daily ice cream fixation).

Anyway… it’s mostly quiet outside and inside now (if I ignore the occasional and mild grumbling protests issuing forth from my belly). Cars driving along St. John. Train cars crashing into each other to hook up, their wheels squealing metal on metal as they grind along the tracks.

The quiet is relative, I suppose, but these individual sounds are all the more apparent because they lack competition.

And then there is the inner dialog (in my head). I can hear myself now, feel myself inhabiting this body from the inside, feel myself straining against the edges of it as it leans into the flannel covered mattress, the almost weightless flannel top sheet envelopment.

A fluid awareness of alternately familiar and foreign aspects of myself.

I start planning the morning (intentions of pan searing the marinating short ribs and diced veggies for a crockpot stew). We’ll see if I keep my commitments.

Later, maybe, I’ll sort out the rest of my life, too.

Now I will indulge in an ear worm – the theme from The Highlander – to lull myself to sleep with.